Knock three times …

My very good friend BFJ and I enjoyed another hotel-and-spa visit this past weekend. We have our usual overnight hotel stay and dinner routine on Friday night, then a huge breakfast and a couple of spa treatments on Saturday morning and afternoon. Around the dinner hour we usually head to our respective homes to recuperate from all the calories ingested and the sore tummy muscles from laughing so hard. We do this several times a year, and our last spa weekend in February was quite – um, how should I say this? – eventful.

We hadn’t spoken to each other face to face for a few months, so we had an awful lot to catch up on. Although my life has been pretty bland lately, hers has been quite interesting, so over dinner, she talked and talked and talked. I listened and drank and drank and drank.

After dinner, instead of heading back to our hotel room to continue the gabfest in private, we decided to go to the hotel bar. Which had these really yummy champagne-like drinks that went down nicely. Which kept tasting like more. Which ended up making our bar bill almost twice as much as our dinner bill had been at the Italian restaurant we’d eaten at earlier. Which also made for a couple of loud, giggly women who really are of an age to know better.

Of course, we weren’t driving, and the bar was in our hotel, so we safely staggered upstairs shortly before the bar closed. But naturally, we were too keyed up to sleep, so although we had no more alcohol, we partied it up some more. Eventually, I had a shower (you try shaving your legs after drinking what I drank that evening – I dare you! It’s a real challenge!), and BFJ changed into her pajamas. But when I emerged, instead of calming down, we simply kept on talking and laughing. Like a couple of goofy teenagers! And by this time it was after 2 am.

Then, from the room next door, there came three startlingly loud thumps on the wall we shared. We froze in mid-giggle. I don’t think we quite comprehended what it was at first.

Then BFJ sputtered in amazement, “We’ve been SHUSHED!”

That started us up again. We rolled under the covers, howling with muffled laughter. Yes, we’d actually been shushed by someone in the hotel room next door. Two grown women acting like loud, drunken idiots had been shushed by someone trying to get some sleep. How embarrassing! And how much more lame and immature could we be???

Yet, the next morning, we huddled in our room till we were quite certain that whoever had been next door had already left, just so we could avoid seeing them and their accusing glare in the hotel hallway or at the checkout desk. So, yes, I guess we could actually be more lame and immature after all.

The good, the bad, and the ugly – part 1

This has been quite the weekend.

My weekend included such diverse elements as an overnight stay in a swanky hotel, a phone-call to hotel security, quality time with my pal BFJ, a chatty spa visit, skanky girls, broken glasses, blown-out candles, a tipped-over branch arrangement, a spilled glass of beer, a spilled bottle of wine, an almost-crunched back bumper on my car, and a delivered Writ of Summons.

Cool, huh?

BFJ is one of my very favourite people. We have been great friends for over 25 years and have seen each other through many, many good and some bad times in those 25+ years. She is smart and funny, wise and intuitive. She is working on her masters degree in counselling, and she will be an amazing counsellor. She is also even more hooked on spas than I am, and we try to get away together three or four times a years overnight to a hotel and spa. This weekend was one of our hotel ‘n’ spa dates.

The almost-crunched bumper came when I was parking my car in the underground carpark of the hotel. I backed in, then popped the trunk to get my gear out. As I got out of the driver’s seat, I realized that I could back in almost another metre, so I hopped back in to do so. I reversed quite slowly, I thought, then heard this big BANG. Holy shit! was my immediate reaction. I’ve smacked my car AGAIN!

I sat there, cursing aloud for a couple of minutes, then got out to see the damage. Nothing. I was still a half a metre from the wall. Huh? I examined the bumper more closely. Nothing. What is going on?!? I puzzled. I definitely heard a huge banging noise. I was so sure I’d hit that wall. Okay, I hadn’t been going fast at all, but that noise surely indicated some damage.

Then I realized that the bang was simply the car trunk bouncing down when I thought I was close to the wall and braked, apparently rather suddenly. O – kay. No damage. No one around to witness my incomprehension and confusion either, fortunately.

After BFJ and I settled into our hotel suite, we headed out for dinner. On the way, we kind-of got blocked by a group of very skanky teenage girls tottering in stilettos down the street ahead of us. Their skirts were basically belts, their tops were down to THERE, and not one of them wore a coat. In February. Okay, this is Vancouver, and our temperatures aren’t as low as most of Canada, but you still need to wear a winter coat in February here. They looked like hookers, quite honestly (Beginner hookers, maybe. More experienced ones probably walk better in stiletto heels.). In fact, a gal coming down the street toward them, and us, said, as she passed them, “A buck for a suck?” We almost died laughing, BFJ and I, but the skanks didn’t get it and twittered on and on about it as we finally were able to get past them and carry on looking for a restaurant.

We ended up at a small bistro that reminded me very much of restaurants in New York – narrow, long, dark. Very personable waiter and yummy food, too. That’s where said waiter dropped a glass and broke it, and where the guy at the next table spilled his beer all over the table and over one of his eating companions. That’s also where BFJ, in her exuberance, laughed so hard that she blew out our candle. She quickly got up to exchange it with a lit one on another table, but as she set it down on our table, she started to laugh again and blew it out again. The server came to our rescue at that point and replaced it with yet another candle that stayed lit this time. I think BFJ figured out how to turn her head to laugh.

Back at the hotel, we stayed up till 2, still laughing (We do that a lot. As I said, BFJ has a terrific sense of humour. And she thinks I’m funny, too.). A scant half-hour later, with BFJ already deep-breathing on the other side of the room, I started to hear loud voices and louder music. Somebody somewhere near our room decided that a loud party in their room at 2:30 in the morning was a good idea and wouldn’t bother anybody. I couldn’t figure out where the noise was coming from. It sounded like it was outside our window, but since we were on the 28th floor, that was unlikely. It was quite loud in our bedroom, but not in our living room. Next door maybe?

BFJ woke up about then, and held the door as I scouted up and down the hallway in my jammies, listening at the doors on either side of us. Nothing there.

BFJ: “I think it’s coming from below us.”

Me: “I think we need to call security.”

So BFJ called the front desk. They had just received another call about all the noise, and told us that security was already on their way up. We listened very closely, hoping to hear the arrival of security at a door near us. We didn’t. But in ten minutes, there was absolutely no noise at all. No music, no voices. I love hotel security. They are stealth. They get results. I want to be hotel security when I grow up. They have power.

And speaking of power, I have the authority to keep you hanging at this point. This stunning story will continue tomorrow, same Bat-time, same Bat-channel.

The other shoe drops

It was Porsche Guy’s company’s Christmas party last weekend. They put it on in a downtown hotel, and it’s a lavish dinner and dance. There are door prizes and a fifty-fifty draw. It’s all free – well, up to your first two drinks. After that, you have to pay an exhorbitant amount for a drink, unless you’ve been savvy enough to save the dinner wine. The hotel also offers a reduced room rate for the night, which we have always taken advantage of, because who wants to be the designated driver at a Christmas party if there’s another choice?

Anyway, we ate and drank and danced for hours, then staggered up to our room at about 1 a.m. PG dropped into bed immediately, having imbibed a good deal more than I had. I leisurely removed my make-up, brushed my teeth, drank several glasses of water (the best way to combat the dehydration of too much alcohol), then slipped into bed myself.

Now, it needs to be said here that I do not sleep well in a warm room. I will fall asleep, but I will not stay asleep. Although I am normally a fairly cold person, I sleep best if the room temperature is well below 20º C – like maybe 15º C. I have always been like this, and so I am quite a fanatic about turning the thermostat down at night (and thereby saving tons of energy, thank you very much). However, this is not so simple in a hotel room. I did look at what I thought was the thermostat, but it didn’t seem to have anything to adjust on it, so I left it alone, hoping that I would sleep well regardless.

I was wide awake at 6 a.m. After five hours of sleep. After eating and drinking and dancing for many hours prior to that. And I felt fine. I just had to go to the bathroom and I was also very thirsty.

PG was snoring oh-so-gently, so I didn’t turn on any lights as I tiptoed to the bathroom. I did what I had to do there, then I went back to bed. To not sleep some more.

At 7 a.m., I decided to have another drink of water. Then I had to pee again. Then I went back to bed. PG barely moved.

At 7:30, I was hot and uncomfortable, so back I went for more water. This time, I also picked up the bill that the hotel staff had slid under the door and placed it on the table so we could look at it in the morning. But wait – it was morning! Time to check the weather outside!

I cautiously moved toward the floor-to-ceiling windows and peeked behind one of the curtains. Nice! Sunny outside!

I made sure the curtain was completely closed, then carefully started to make my way back to my side of the bed – and tripped over a pair of shoes. I tried to be quiet, but I’m sure I made some noise. I rubbed my toes where I’d bonked them into the shoes, then tried to continue my slow progress back to the other side of the room.

And tripped over ANOTHER pair of shoes! With the same toes! So much for being quiet.

“What kind of person would leave TWO fucking pairs of shoes in the MIDDLE of the fucking room?!” I shouted.

I kicked all four shoes against the wall – THUD – and stomped noisily back to bed, not caring any more whether I disturbed PG.

Half an hour later, he rolled over and said only, “The mouth on you!”

I felt like throwing the shredder he had won as a door prize into his face.